> It really isn't very likely that anyone will ever publish a computer science paper as impactful as Dijkstra's go-to-statement thing.

Ok, disclaimer that I am not a computer scientist (work in semiconductors so only tangentially related). But, this statement has the same "end of history" energy has the famous Philipp von Jolly quote about end of theoretical physics:

"In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."

I'm not claiming you are saying its end of CS, just the claim that there cannot be a new paradigm discovered in CS doesn't sit right with me.

I think there's an enormous amount that can still be discovered, including new paradigms. I don't agree with Ken Thompson's opinion that people studying informatics today are unlucky because the most interesting stuff is already done.

But I don't think it's especially controversial to claim that Galileo and Newton had more of an impact on physics than Maxwell and Einstein or than anyone since. You could maybe quibble about Gauss and Lagrange, but Kip Thorne and Ed Witten are much more similar to Galileo than Galileo was to Descartes or Aristotle.

You might be able to cause an Einstein-like revolution in informatics—LLMs in particular seem like they have a good chance of doing that. But the field those new paradigms revolutionize will probably be recognizably the field that was largely defined by papers published in CACM in the 60s and 70s.

Also, although this isn't relevant to my thesis that probably nobody will publish such an impactful paper again, the ACM is especially unlikely to. "Attention is All You Need" https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3... got published in NIPS 2017 rather than CACM or even an ACM conference. You could imagine a timeline where CACM was the Cell or Lancet of informatics and published papers like AiAYN instead of "The Transformative Power of Inspiration". But that's not the one we're in.